The Hills Have Eyes 2 proves that even grisly, gory violence can be awfully boring.

The filmmakers may have hoped to make a timely commentary on the amorality in our executive suites, but they end up merely restating the obvious. Maybe the whole thing would have played better as a corporate comedy, the kind that Doris Day and Rock Hudson made some 50 years ago.

A disregard for the rules established by George Romero (or the alternatives imagined by Danny Boyle) is far from the only problem with Christopher Landon's film, which does prove one thing fairly handily: Even beings deprived of the intellect and spirit granted to living humans can team up to produce a major studio motion picture.

The main thing consumers will be looking for from Resurgence is bang-for-buck entertainment, and that it delivers reasonably successfully.

After nearly two hours of nonstop mayhem, the film ends on a surprisingly muted note, though pains have been taken to make sure that the hoped-for sequel has been carefully set up.

The film — penned by Michael Ricigliano Jr., a lawyer making his screenwriting debut — never really achieves the necessary dramatic tension despite a surprising climactic plot twist. The dialogue rarely rises above the level of cliché.

To borrow a cliche from another medium, Santa might have jumped the shark.

Not only doesn't provide any real information, it barely manages to convey why we should care. It represents a true squandering of a potentially fascinating subject.

Least Among Saints has the strained feel of a basic cable television movie, with modest production values to match.

Plot details turn out to be secondary to the cheap visual effects and abundant gore that Reeder frequently manages to incorporate by taking the narrative on some inexplicable and queasily violent detours. Overall, performances are just perfunctory enough to convey the concept of acting.

The movie is character-driven every step of the way. That’s why, even if the world created by Jones and his talented design collaborators, both old-school physical and cutting-edge digital, isn’t seamlessly believable so much as staggeringly crafted, it casts a spell.

The film unfortunately depicts black female sexuality, a topic rarely portrayed onscreen, with all the depth and subtlety of a late night Cinemax offering.

This would-be cult film is unlikely to inspire "Rocky Horror"-style devotion.

It's almost unfathomable that this one made it through all the preliminary production meetings without someone sensibly calling a halt to the process by saying, "Wait a minute, those kitties are damn creepy!"

Although ultimately far too muddled in its concept and execution to be anything more than a curiosity, The Scribbler does manage the dubious feat of being one of the strangest films you’re likely to see this year.

The film contains numerous stylistic flourishes... But none of these elements advance the story, prompt a deeper emotional response or suggest something new about the characters, reducing them to meaningless window-dressing for what little story their is.

In terms of inspiration or even the slightest shred of ingenuity, Banks ranks more like an 000 than an 007.

Even assuming the best possible motives by its makers, Beyond Borders runs the risk of making human suffering exotic while glamorizing white disaster relief workers in the Third World.

Jonas is, it should be said, the most likeable thing about this watered-down noir.

What starts out as a reasonably effective ghost story devolves into familiar torture porn in Cassadaga, Anthony DiBlasi’s muddled horror film ineffectively blending two genre styles.

Lame sketch comedy, an uninspired performance from Will Ferrell and an overall failure of the imagination turn Brad Silberling's Land of the Lost into a lethargic meander through a wilderness of misfiring gags.

Director Newbery proves ill-equipped to handle the convoluted narrative shifts of the screenplay co-written by Finola Geraghty, Brendan Bishop and Laurence Lamers. But to be fair, even Hitchcock would have thrown up his hands at the illogical plotting and over-the-top contrivances that make "North by Northwest" look like a documentary by comparison.

Featuring one-note characterizations, laughable dialogue, an overwrought musical score and technically poor filmmaking values, the film ultimately is utterly reprehensible.

Like so many pictures about artists, be they visual artists or composers or even writers, Modi, Three Days on the Wing of Madness doesn’t dare to engage with any seriousness about craft, application and technique or any of the nitty-gritty stuff that truly makes their creations important.

If the target audience for this film were any younger, they'd be embryos.

A rom-com whose agreeable individual elements aren't enough to sell the witless contrivance around which they revolve.

Sinister 2 comes up a bit short on creative resources, although director Ciaran Foy probably gets enough right to entice those partial to the original.

While it has a few genuine scares (cat lovers will want to avert their eyes for one horrific scene), it never achieves the deliriously freaky heights one expects from a film version of one of King’s cheesier novels.

While the director/screenwriter is to be commended for avoiding the usual bloodsucker clichés, he hasn't replaced them with anything particularly interesting, with the result that the story plays like a quasi-mystical melodrama featuring characters about whom we care little.

Instant fodder for drinking games, Dangerous Men is a grand testament to its filmmaker's undeniable passion, tenacity and complete lack of talent.

Neither funny, insightful nor moving, it's mostly objectionable for its failure to exploit the facets of Coogan's screen persona that line up so neatly with the smug blatherers who dominate the AM dial.

Mendelsohn's villain is boringly one-note, Eve Hewson's Marion uses an incongruous Yank accent and always looks as though she's just stepped out of the makeup trailer, F. Murray Abraham swans around in fancy cardinal's vestments looking sinister and Foxx seems pissed off that he's not somewhere, perhaps anywhere, else. As for Egerton, he's a boy doing a man's job.

This film’s thin charms lie not in its authenticity but in its zippy energy, good-looking cast and mild sprinkling of action.

Despite some clever touches, the derivative film doesn't manage to live up to its clever premise.

Tim Story's Tom & Jerry is five to ten minutes of action that might have worked in one of the cartoon duo's shorts, surrounded by an inordinate amount of unimaginative, unfunny human-based conflict.

Too squeaky-clean to convey the turbulence of the period.

Club Life demonstrates that not everyone has a compelling story to tell.

While director Martin keeps the film moving, its implausibilities turn from holes into canyons.

A formulaic comedy that displays as much subtlety as its title.

If "This Christmas" served up a crowd-pleasing portion of yuletide "Soul Food," then The Perfect Holiday offers dried-out leftovers.

Brightest Star is too dim to sustain interest even with its very brief running time.

In the depiction of this unlikely journey -- it is supposedly based on a real-life story -- the film awkwardly veers between naturalism and a striving for poetic myth.

Director Camille Delamarre (Brick Mansions) and his collaborators have devised a few nifty sequences.

Much of the film’s effectiveness can be credited to King, who makes Shannon appealing even when acting selfishly. It’s also refreshing to see a teen character portrayed by an actual teenager as opposed to the usual twentysomething.

An experimental, transgressive work that pretty much fails on every level, A Hole in My Heart, depicting the efforts of a trio of amateur porn filmmakers, eventually will be considered a minor footnote to a talented director's career. In the meantime, it's the audience members that will have to suffer.

As low-budget horror filmmaking goes however, this is derivative, uninspired material.

Bad movies are bad. Bad theater is worse. But bad movies resembling bad theater are perhaps worst of all.

As a supposed snapshot of life in the unaccommodating big city, and of the humane gestures that can soften that harshness, it feels utterly synthetic, not to mention a romantically "European" view of New York that's sheer nonsense.

Shorn of its New Age platitudes, the film works reasonably well as a mature, feel-good romance, especially since Holmes and Lucas are so engaging that you find yourselves rooting for their characters to get together.

The movie is a letdown, stringing together pointless episodes to little effect. It's the kind of thinly conceived, quirk-for-quirk's-sake indie that gives indies a bad name.

Notable Bollywood producer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra makes a highly uneasy transition to American films with this weirdly baroque modern-day Western that, while it boasts undeniably imaginative visual and plot flourishes, is far too absurd to take seriously.

Highly watchable, anchored sturdily by Lane's convincing performance.

Mainly Bernie's is good old, knock-down slapstick with just the right dose of cruelty thrown in.

The film is so ridiculously overwrought that it makes the Madea films look subtle by comparison.

The film doesn't know what it wants to be -- reality programming pushed to the max or a satire of reality TV? -- but it winds up as an exercise in the rankest sort of cynicism.

Unfinished Business is the cinematic equivalent of sub-par fast food (think Carl’s Jr. or Jack in the Box); it’s cheap, easy and maybe even tasty for a second or two, but leaves you feeling queasy and undernourished.

While the team-up still fails to become more than the sum of its parts, at least we can appreciate Hayek’s enthusiasm for the over-the-top role.

The novelty of the setting ultimately proves highly effective. Shot mainly in Eastern European locations that effectively stand in for Prypiat, which is now actually a tourist site, the film is highly convincing in its verisimilitude.

Comprising reclaimed bits from "Blade Runner," "A Clockwork Orange" and "Children of Men" and glibly served up with hyper Guy Ritchie attitude by first-time feature director Miguel Sapochnik, the resulting in-your-face mess never knows what it wants to be when it grows up.

As lovely to look at, relaxing and soporific as the perfect summer day sung by David Bowie at the beginning of the film, Wim Wenders’ The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez scatters some nice ideas amid non-stop French dialogue that only speed readers of subtitles will be able to follow fully.

It suffers from a lack of genuine chills or suspense that renders its slight virtues rather moot.

Compensating for its less than convincing special effects with some intriguing plot twists and bracingly nihilistic situations, The Human Race is a reasonably compelling low-budget genre item.

It's like being trapped for an hour-and-a-half in a pound full of yappy puppies.

This Chekhovian-style comedy about a group of neurotic actors endlessly kibitzing during a weekend at a country house might have some appeal for self-absorbed thespians, but "civilians," as they're derisively referred to in the film, will find little of interest here.

A banal revenge melodrama-cum-detective story, but fans of the video game on which it is based should not be alarmed.

An acutely misguided, purported satire dealing with the prickly subject of child molestation.

Fredrik Bond makes a promising feature debut with this fanciful crime-drama romance that gratifyingly eschews strict genre classification.

I Still See You is painful to watch, and having to learn all the new jargon only makes it feel like an academic chore.

It would, after all, take a sleuth of Hercule Poirot-like talents to discern what attracted these supremely talented (not to mention, in the case of one of them, Oscar-winning) thespians to such lame, cliched material.

The only things left out of The Single Moms Club are genuine humor and emotion.

None of the performers are able to bring life to their schematic characters, although Nelson appears to be having fun as a modern-day pirate. You do get the feeling, however, that he would have much preferred to play the role with a patch on his eye and a parrot on his shoulder.

The performers do what they can with the tired material, with Starr mining his doofus character for all it's worth and Perlman making a committed investment that doesn't pay off. Despite their strenuous efforts and the picturesque Catskill Mountains locations, The Escape of Prisoner 614 comes to feel as laborious as its title.

They don't make movies like Jolene anymore, and that's a good thing.

If you’re going to make an ultra-naturalistic, two-character, walking-and-talking romance that tips its hat to Before Sunrise, the film that began Richard Linklater’s exquisite trilogy, then it’s best to avoid a script loaded with contrived situations and overwritten dialogue.

Surveillance will please the B-movie crowd in theaters and on into the ancillaries

In terms of drama, or melodrama, or just bad drama, Freed rarely delivers the goods while trying hard to give fans what they came for.

Action scenes are serviceable enough but rarely exciting, pumped up with Snyder’s usual tool kit of speed-ramping and slo-mo. But there’s a grimy aesthetic to the movie that becomes ugly and tiresome (the director took on the DP role himself), and the episodic plotting seldom builds enough steam to stop you thinking about other things.

There are far too many script misfires and built-in flat tires (every time the bodybuilding trio shows up the film dies) to overcome. [19 May 1991]

As bland and forgettable as its title.

Witless, soulless and joyless, it displays its video game origins throughout.

The screenplay by Luke Dawson and Jeremy Slater begins promisingly enough with its slow-burn examination of the various moral issues involved. But once Zoe is resuscitated the proceedings descend into familiar horror film film tropes.

A lackluster affair, devoid of laughs and just about anything else one might construe as entertainment.

The clumsy and cliched approach by writer-director Bala Rajashekaruni robs the movie of any dramatic punch.

This latest incarnation represents the sort of charmless, wildly chaotic animated effort that has the unintended effect of reminding us why cutting publicly funded children’s television is such a terrible idea.

Cursed, a modern-day werewolf tale that fails to provide either Craven's trademark chills or Williamson's trademark satirical wit, is a distinctly subpar film that, but for the current boxoffice streak enjoyed by such formulaic genre entries, deserved to go direct to video.

The castmembers portraying Splinter and the turtles achieve a persuasive level of realism that was never possible with the elaborate puppetry required for the original film series and adequately fulfill expectations for their characters.

Ice-bound black comedy boasts strong cast for an indie but can't quite decide what it wants to be.

The sole redeeming factor is the presence of Olivia Wilde (Fox's "House"), who manages to keep the proceedings watchable for at least a portion of the running time.

Battlefield America manages to pack every cliché imaginable into its overstuffed and overlong 106 minutes.

Despite its laudable intentions and important social message, Black November is far too ineffective to have the desired impact.

Intensely present and real even in this sordid role, Ramazzotti shows she is growing into one of Italy's most versatile actresses, particularly in difficult proletarian roles like the one here. She is literally the best thing in this depressing, often shallow film.

All highs eventually fade, and The Last Laugh quickly returns to its noxious mix of sweet and sour.

A surfeit of bad-ass mystery-man posturing and dearth of either convincing emotion or visceral kicks makes this pastiche unmoving, an assemblage of tropes few will enjoy wading through.

The star wattage quickly dims in this slick-looking but ringingly hollow affair that starts off generically at best before collapsing into a convoluted heap of shrill screen cliches.

There is little worse in the movie world than a spoof that falls flat on its over-costumed butt, but that's what you get with Your Highness.

Cruz’s aces performance apart, very little about this extremely disappointing film feels real, and some of it is risible.

A pedestrian thriller whose personal-tech gimmick is even more thinly imagined than one might guess, it's a jumble of cheap jump scares made watchable by likable leads Elizabeth Lail and Jordan Calloway.

And thanks to some creative character casting and a self-aware script that isn't averse to poking fun at itself, Show Dogs emerges as a high-concept family comedy that manages to avoid being taken for the runt of the litter, even if it doesn't really bring anything fresh and different to the arena.